The New Normal
by SimplexityJane
Summary: Quinn left New Orleans with the clothes on her back, supplies in her car, and her dead boyfriend's kids in the back seat. She hasn't gotten much further in her plan than getting away from the zombies. M for violence.
1. The Outbreak

**This is a companion piece to _It's the Zombie Apocalypse, Charlie Brown! _and features Quinn Fabray trying to get herself and the Evans children to safety. As always this is unbetaed, so if you see any mistakes please point them out.**

**This is a WIP, and it's also Faberry. But that's later.**

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Quinn shot her boyfriend in the face.

His name was Sam, and he was the first zombie she killed. They'd been hanging out at his house, playing video games and discussing the merits of the original Star Wars movies when he decided to pick up some coke for his brother and sister. Stacey had a cold and therefore both of them were at home, Sam and Quinn acting as babysitters.

She still wonders if that saved her.

Stacey was watching Bob the Builder, Stevie whining about Power Rangers, when the television went fuzzy and one of those 'monthly tests' came on. Except this wasn't a test and Quinn felt her throat drop into her stomach as she moved automatically to the Evans' room and wrapped a sheet around her hand- she didn't know where the key was, but the front of the gun cabinet was glass.

Shotgun in hand and loaded as much as it could be, Quinn yelled into the living room, "Stevie, take Stacey into the hall closet. Don't come out until I say, alright?" Stevie was ten and he looked as hard faced as she was as he hauled four-year-old Stacey behind him. She knelt down in front of him. "Stevie, if I'm not back before dark you two need to find an adult with a gun. Talk to strangers, and if anyone comes after you-"

"I know, Quinn, I snuck down here and watched a zombie movie once." He smiled and there was still a tooth growing in.

When she opened the door she came face to face with a dizzy looking Sam. He was holding his stomach and she could see the green tint on his face. He grinned when he caught sight of her, gums swollen and bloody like the TV had warned them about.

"Hi," he said, but it strangled in his throat and came out like a growl. She shrieked and raised the shotgun up to her shoulder, firing once. The shot blew off his face and Quinn felt blood spatter on her arms along with tissue, but she couldn't worry about that now. She couldn't. She had to get her car and load up on supplies so she and the kids could get the hell out of New Orleans.

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Stevie held Stacey close to his chest as they waited. She couldn't read yet, but Stevie had watched the television flash gray and announce that zombies were real.

It had been in flashing red: **This is not a test. An international state of emergency has been declared in every country of the world, after a zombie virus was spread by geo-terrorists through blood donations. The population is advised to stay in their homes to avoid exposure. Please do not panic.**

But Stevie knew that was dumb, and even Quinn agreed with him. Wherever she was going (probably to get water, that was supposed to be real important right?) she wasn't staying inside.

Stacey had started crying when they heard the muffled sound of a gunshot. He'd tried to tell her it was a car backfiring, but she hadn't believed him and kept going on about Mom and Dad and Sam, even though Sam was at the store. Stevie figured he should have been back by now.

"Shh, Stace, go to sleep, okay? When you wake up it'll be better."

Even at ten, Stevie didn't believe himself.

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The car was a newer Honda, big enough to store an almost decent water and food supply in the trunk and under the seats, most of the back seat taken up by ammunition for the semiautomatic she'd taken from the gun store. Her total zombie count was up to a hundred and some change, and she was sure the freak out was going to come sooner rather than later.

But for now she drove down Sam's street and tried not to flinch as she ran over every zombie in her path. The car wouldn't be pretty, but with the full tank and extras that had made her place some water bottles at the front of the car instead they might make it somewhere that wasn't densely populated.

She hadn't gotten much further with that plan.

Sam's- the body was still on the front porch, and she felt her body prepare to throw up. Hold it in, you need everything. She grit her teeth and checked the street for more man eaters, relieved to find it seemingly deserted as she crossed the yard into the house.

Stevie hugged her when he caught sight of her, Stacey curled up into a ball that protested when Quinn picked her up in her arms.

"Okay, we're going on a trip, Stace." She blinked sleepily. "You have to keep your eyes on the sky, though, can you do that?" The girl nodded wearily. "Good. Stevie, take my hand. You've gotta do it too, or it won't be fair."

Stevie just nodded and took her hand. She wanted to cry.

"Okay, let's go." She walked as quickly as she could through the house, feeling naked without her gun as she opened the door and tried to make sure Stevie and Stacey didn't see the body. She felt her heart pounding in her ears as she opened the passenger door and let them clamber in, directing Stacey to the back and telling them to put their seatbelts on. Stevie didn't look once at the house as they were driving away, which meant he'd probably seen-

Hell, she hadn't wanted to scar them.

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Stacey didn't know what was going on, sniffling about Sam and Momma and Daddy, but Stevie had a pretty good idea. And since it stained the bottom of his sneakers he was pretty sure he wasn't imagining it.

Quinn knew it too- he didn't want to know who the body had been or if she'd found Sam, though he knew somewhere that he wasn't seeing his brother ever again. Quinn kept one hand on her gun and drove with the other, taking shots whenever the zombies got too close. Stacey had stopped screaming hours ago, but she still flinched.

Everything inside Stevie had gone cold and he figured that was good. So long as he and Quinn were cold, Stacey could have all the warmth.

They stopped on a road that might have been in the country before all this. Quinn pulled a flashlight from the glove box and let it flash over the area before she nodded.

"We'll eat and sleep here. Stacey, there's stuff to make sandwiches in the bag beside you. Just hand it to me, okay?" Stacey was crying as she did. "Stevie, three of those water bottles. You two have to drink all your bottle, and if you need to pee you have to wake me up. Don't go out of the car alone at all." She used a plastic knife to spread the peanut butter and jelly over bread and handed the sandwich to Stacey. "Eat it. We won't stop to have a full meal until tomorrow night. Okay?"

"'Kay," Stacey whispered. Stevie took the second sandwich from Quinn and nodded that he got it, drinking his water and eating it quickly.

That first night Stevie hardly slept at all. Quinn had let Stacey climb into his seat with him, getting a thin blanket from the trunk for them to use. She slept without one. Her face didn't relax, but she only caught him staring once so he guessed she must have slept some. Stacey had to pee once, and they all squatted beside the road so they wouldn't have to do it again; once there was a noise and Quinn left the car for a few minutes and came back with an empty chamber on her gun. She didn't look too good.

"You okay?" he whispered. It was starting to get gray and Stacey was shifting around. Stevie shifted so she was on the seat and crawled into the back.

Quinn nodded in the mirror as she turned on the car, but Stevie knew she wasn't.

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Their supplies would run out in a little over a week, Quinn figured out while she was driving through the second day. She had over a thousand dollars in the car, and the gas stations would probably stay open for her to refill twice. That would put her around twelve hundred miles worth of gas plus her gas cans- maybe fifteen hundred miles. They could get water if the grocery stores hadn't been ransacked, and the peanut butter wouldn't go bad quickly.

After that- Quinn couldn't think that far. She had to keep Stevie and Stacey safe, everything else was immaterial.

The only direction she had in her head was north- it was the only way _to_ go from New Orleans. Now that they'd made it out of that death trap they could go anywhere. Maybe some smaller towns had escaped the plague.

"We're going to find a place to take a bath today, okay Stacey?" Germs were suddenly the worst thing in the world- she only had pain killers and Tylenol. If one of them got so much as a cold it could turn deadly. _Thank you, Rob_, she thought. He'd dated her mother for eight months when she was thirteen and gave her an army survival manual for Christmas. It had been the only thing that didn't bore her to tears when she got pneumonia the next year.

She hoped he was alive.

"Okay," Stacey said quietly, and Stevie shot her a look in the mirror. Quinn shook her head.

By the time she found a suitable place to squat for the night it was three in the afternoon and they'd stopped to pee twice. It was a secluded house surrounded by trees, no cars in the driveway and no signs of zombies. She still made Stacey and Stevie stay in the car while she went through the yard, flinching internally at every crack and flicker of movement. When she knocked she wasn't surprised not to get an answer, calling the kids to hurry over.

She checked the refrigerator while the kids bathed but came up empty handed. There was a pack of cigarettes in a cabinet and some cereal, and the freezer yielded hamburger meat. They had to get meat where they found it, so she pulled out a skillet- luckily they abandoned most of their cookware, maybe they had survived- and started cooking the mostly frozen meat.

When Stevie and Stacey came out of the bathroom she made sure he would watch the stove before heading into the shower. She washed quickly, coming to a split decision about her messy tangles and snipping them as close to the scalp as possible. When she looked in the mirror afterward she hardly recognized herself. The stranger in the mirror was hard lined, eyes an icy blue sneer without an ounce of warmth in them. Her hair was gone, shaved off after she figured out how to use the electric razor left behind, and it all added up into a picture of someone untouchable.

Stacey screamed when Quinn entered the kitchen again, and even Stevie's composure cracked a little. She raised an eyebrow at them and took over on the stove, where the meat was almost completely done. She waited until there was no trace of pink left before turning it off.

"Stevie, I'm going to get water from the car. There were apples in the cabinet, you and your sister eat at least one. There's a bed here, if the two of you want to sleep here tonight." It made her skin feel unsettled though she knew it didn't show.

When she got back Stacey was biting into an apple viciously while Stevie doled out portions of meat on finer china than they could ever have taken on the road. They'd take the forks, though. Those would be priceless in the days ahead.

"Do we still say grace?" Stacey asked, the very picture of innocence. Quinn felt something twisting badly in her chest and she took Stacey's hand to help quell it.

"Of course. Stevie?" He took her hand after only a little hesitation and she closed her eyes. "Dear Lord," she said, and stopped. She didn't want to pray, didn't think she could believe after all of this in a just and merciful god, but Stacey and Stevie needed something to be normal. She grit her teeth and continued, "Thank you for this day we've been given, and our safety on the road. Please bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and allow us safe sleep and travel. Amen." It felt hollow, but Stacey's brilliant grin was worth it.

The food filled their bellies and Stacey and Stevie both wanted to stay the night. When Stacey was brushing her teeth, after Quinn had filled up all their used water bottles for later, Stevie took her off to the side.

"Mom and Dad are dead, aren't they?" he said. Quinn nodded. "And Sam? Did you kill him?"

"No," she said firmly. "Sam was killed when he was bitten by a zombie. I only shot the zombie he'd been replaced with. If I hadn't we'd all be dead right now or worse."

Stevie nodded shortly before asking, "Will you shave my head like yours?"

"If you want," Quinn said. Stevie just nodded his response.


	2. Salvation

**Sorry for the long wait for the update! It's almost winter break (after finals, wow, why am I writing this when I need to be studying?), so I'm going to write more on It's the Apocalypse and hopefully people will like what I wrote. **

**TW: Blood, violence. Not for people who've gone through gunfights and their aftermath. **

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Stevie didn't want to think about the week after the zombies too much. Many years later he would tell his daughter that he'd been too young to remember it, but obviously that wasn't true. Even Stacey remembered some things.

The next few days were filled with nightmares as they continued driving. Some of them were almost like fantasies, his mom as a zombie telling him it was time to eat dinner and Sam's head being the main dish, but the really scary ones were because on the fourth day, when Quinn was forced to stop for gas, he saw his first zombies.

There was only one at first, and Quinn yelled at him and Stacey to get down and not look, but he didn't listen. He watched her take it out with one shot that blew off its head- it had been a guy and his baseball cap went flying, he remembered that really well. The gas tank was filling up and two more came, dead before they even got close. Dad had said something once about Quinn being a natural marksman, and Stevie got it now. She was firing through the gas pumps, the most amazing one going through three of them, and yeah, they were in a straight line but it was still awesome.

She filled up the tank and her cans (the computers still worked to control the pumps somehow) and before Stevie knew it they were out of there.

When he dreamed of the zombies they had faces, and he screamed in his sleep. Stacey screamed too, and Quinn held them both in her arms. She probably didn't sleep much.

"Hoarders," Quinn muttered when they found themselves in a house trying to get supplies. There looked like a thousand boxes and cans, and the bloody smear on the ground outside was pretty obviously the person who'd lived here before. Before they got out of the car Quinn had made them take a nap- well, Stacey took a nap, Stevie pretended to for a minute and watched her pulling the dead body out of the way.

"Can we stay here a little while?" Stacey asked. Quinn seemed to count the boxes of rice, vegetables, and soup (Campbell's!). The power was about to go out in houses, which was supposed to be bad.

"A few days, Stace," she said.

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It was hard to think of the house as safe- nowhere was safe. But Quinn knew a little bit about stress and the need for rest, and Stacey was only a kid. She didn't really understand that her parents were dead, that her brother had probably been eaten. She couldn't understand that nothing was going to be the same. When Quinn found _Snow White_ and popped it into a still working VHS player Stacey watched, entranced, even though the quality was grainy and there was a bar of gray going through the scenes on the screen. That was the first night. She managed to sleep through the night; so did Stevie. Quinn had time to go for supplies, though she almost didn't make it back.

Stevie grumbled when Quinn made him take a shower.

"There might not be running water after today, Stevie," she said. Stacey was just standing there, already having had her shower and shivering in the cold. The clothes had already been washed, but they were waiting for them to dry. Stevie glared and tried to shut the curtain. "And if you're hurt in any way, I need to know about it," she said, keeping the curtain in her hand. "I know, it's not what we'd do before. But I promise I won't look at your private, just like you promised not to look at Stacey's when she was taking a shower." She hated the apocalypse. If he had a rash anywhere, _she_ wouldn't know what to do with it. She had some rash cream in the glove box, but that might not be enough.

He cleaned quickly and thoroughly, then she directed them to put on dry clothes- and to make sure they were dry, because they would get sores if they didn't wear really dry clean clothes, especially underwear. She'd had to brave a Wal-Mart for clothes, and the amount of zombies had nearly overwhelmed her. She'd slept for a whole day afterward, which had helped but didn't make her feel any better. She was so tired.

The water had gone cold, but she washed anyway. She had been using spouts in abandoned houses before she got home to clean off goo and guts- waiting an hour to make sure she hadn't turned- but god, a real shower felt so good, even if it was cold. The layer of dirt slowly wore away and she dried off with one of the hard won towels.

The power cut off during dinner. Luckily she'd been able to cook beforehand.

They'd been there three days. It had been eleven since the breakout.

"We have to leave tomorrow," she said to the darkness as she lit the candle. Luckily she'd had enough water boiled to put in the bottles that that wouldn't be a problem. "We have to find a store with a generator, and then a good place that isn't anywhere near the zombies. Neither of you are allowed to disagree with me about this." She hoped she didn't sound like a bitch, but she couldn't have more drama than she already had.

It went to hell. Things always go to hell just when someone's trying to make them better, after all, or that was what Quinn thought.

It started at the gas pump, which wouldn't take her money. Apparently whatever electricity ran the city had cut off completely, not just whatever supplied the houses. Luckily she had gas cans and a siphon, even though it took her two tries to figure out how to get the gasoline to come out of the car. She was able to fill up the car slowly, and they left at ten in the morning. She made sure Stevie and Stacey were eating granola bars and even had one herself- even if she didn't really feel like eating, which could be explained by the ten zombies she'd had to kill before she'd filled up. They travelled on the interstate, which was surprisingly clear- or not, it wasn't like zombies could attack people going seventy miles an hour. She went fifty-five.

There was a Lowes at the next exit, in a town called itself Bentonville. She didn't know exactly where they were, didn't know if the Lowes had been raided by survivors (she'd seen them, cars moving slowly through the streets, backing away from hers or guys with guns who made her shoot at their tires to get them to back off). She didn't know when Louisiana had turned into Arkansas.

She turned into the deserted parking lot, wary for any zombies. There were no signs of life.

"Stevie, shoot anyone if they can get in the car, you get it?" she said. He might miss, but the sound would alert her. There was a queasy feeling in her stomach, almost like a premonition.

When she had the generator she ran through the store, a feeling of foreboding tight in her chest. The car was parked right next to the doors. She got a good view of the raiders before they saw her.

There were two of them, two men, and one of them had Stevie and Stacey in his hands. The kids were struggling. The other man was going through the car, messing with the supplies, looking at the guns appreciatively. Quinn didn't let the generator hit the ground any harder than a slight thump. The gun in her hand was reassuring.

Killing zombies was easy. Killing men, however, that was difficult.

They had the kids. God, it was too easy to shoot the man holding Stacey by the hair.

_He'll take food from them_. His brains were gray, blood dark red on the asphalt. He'd been going for his gun.

Stacey screamed.

"Quinn!" Stevie shouted, and her arms were filled with a ten-year-old. She cried into his hair and carried him over to Stacey, shielding her in her shoulder. Stacey shuddered and cried. "I couldn't get it pulled, they took it, I didn't think you would come."

"Shh," she said. "I came, I swear I'll always come Stevie, you're mine, you and Stacey, you're both mine, my babies." She was babbling, almost crying.

"Awesome, you got them!" someone said. Quinn didn't feel herself move. She was pointing a gun at the intruder before she could blink. And it was a girl, wearing a garish pink and green sweater and a grin that took up her whole face. There was a rifle strapped to her shoulder that dwarfed her, as well as knives at her belt and gun hilts poking out of the work boots she was wearing. "Woah, don't shoot, I was after them too." Her hands raised in a placating gesture. Away from the weapons on her belt, but towards the one on her back. That wouldn't be effective from a short distance, Quinn reassured herself, and she could always rush her before she could even do anything. "I'm Rachel Berry."

She put the gun through her belt.

"Quinn- Evans," she said, only stuttering over it slightly. "I'm- you're not running or trying to steal from me. What the hell do you want?"

Rachel huffed a laugh that sounded almost rueful.

"Nice people you've met," she said. "Look, you've got kids and it's September, almost October, it's going to get cold. I live with a few people about three miles out of here, why don't you come with me? We can use all the help we can get."

It seemed like a miracle in human form, but- "How do I know you're telling the truth?" she asked. Rachel, if that was her name, smiled that grin again and shrugged.

"I guess you'll have to have faith in humanity. And you've got your gun, if you wanted I'd be dead in half a second." Something in her expression made Quinn doubt that, but it was true enough. Hadn't she just been thinking about those types of scenarios?

"If you try to con us, I'll blow your brains out," she said for good measure. Rachel laughed again, this time clear and tinkling, like a bell.

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They followed Rachel, who was in a great big bus of a thing- she'd gotten at least four generators and several pieces of lumber ("We're building walls, just in case."), fertilizer filling up the back and lightbulbs packed lightly between crevices of a washer. She'd made Quinn help her, of course, and Stevie had wanted to ride with her. Quinn had gotten _her_ generator, as well as several things of water and screws, nuts and bolts; those had been Rachel's impact. Stacey still refused to talk.

The little community was surrounded by farmland, and Quinn could tell immediately that Rachel hadn't been lying when she'd offered her a place. The person guarding the road let them through without fuss, nodding at Quinn as she passed. Stevie nodded at him like he was an adult.

"There are twenty of us," Rachel said when they parked, in the middle of a cul de sac of buildings that looked more like a great farm complex. There was a barn. There were pigs and five cows. God, the chickens were running around in the dirt. "Including you. My dads-" She nodded to the two men approaching, one tall and obviously Jewish, the other slightly shorter and black. "They're Hiram and Leroy to everyone else, though. My birth mom, Shelby, runs the barn and used to teach. Dad, Daddy, this is Quinn Evans, and Stevie and Stacey." She turned the bright grin onto the kids, and Stacey even smiled back. That was good. "There are two other kids too, but they're both boys, sorry Stacey. You'll just have to hang out with us, I guess. The rest are farmers who came here after the breakout because my dads figured it would be better to stick together."

"How old are you?" Quinn asked. She'd been assuming the girl had been twenty or older, but talking like that she sounded younger than Quinn.

"I'm sixteen," she said promptly. "So, how do you like it? I figured Quinn could help with the harvest and the chores that we never get to, and Shelby's been asking for more help since she got Dylan and Jace to help." Hiram smiled warmly at Quinn, and Leroy actually shook her hand.

"Rachel has good judgment," he said. "I hope you find the place to your liking."

And like that, Quinn was one of twenty of the last living people on earth.


	3. Killers

**As a celebration of the semester ending, I'm posting this next chapter. Action will start picking back up after this one, I promise. The Rachel/Quinn is an incredibly slow burn.**

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No one slept throughout the night anymore. Not even Rachel, who didn't even have a watch shift. Instead of watching the road, she'd volunteer to help with the wall (cement and bricks in some areas, wood in others, and she'd had to drive into the city again for more supplies when they'd run out because they were building the wall as high as they could), or with filtering water, or picking and pickling squash and cucumbers for winter- there were canned tomatoes already, dozens of them that Ollie Penn had been going to sell in a flea market, which made all the manicures she'd had in the old world go to ruin quickly. Daddy said it was because she needed something to do now that her morning routine had been interrupted so drastically, and Rachel had to agree. Everyone had _something_. Dad fussed over the vitamins an supplements they were supposed to be taking, Shelby treated the twins like her own children (which was fair, since she'd found them and given them a home here), Ollie was doing the math for the rice and whether contaminated runoff would make it inedible, and so he had decided to harvest it anyway- Norah and James had killed most of their chickens so they could have corn and meat for the winter- those had been dried and smoked. The first time Rachel had been fed chicken jerky she'd almost cried.

The first day Quinn worked with them- after going to the bathroom, looking green all the while (Dad had shoved vitamins at her, especially pre-natal because they were the ones that had the most necessary chemicals inside them, and Daddy had said she felt a little warm.) she'd taken one look at the dried meat and said, "That looks like a dog treat." She ate it anyway, just like she ate the processed eggs and chicken they'd made for dinner the night before. Those 'tv dinners', for all that they had far too many preservatives, weren't going to last them forever. It was best, Daddy said (with Dad twitching in the background) to eat those first.

Quinn was surprisingly fit for a girl who'd been on the road and hiding in abandoned houses for several days. She didn't like to talk about it, which Rachel noticed because she wasn't actually as shallow as some people had thought she was at school.

She didn't like to think about the first days either. She'd been home from school because her throat was sore- and she'd wanted to go on to Broadway, her meticulous performance in class would have been affected had she gone. Shelby hadn't, but she'd used a fire hydrant to fight off infected students. Shelby, Dad, and Daddy. She hadn't thought of Shelby like her mother in years, more like a close aunt, but this was all the family she had left in the world. She'd realized after the breakout that her dreams of perfect balance and pacifism were impossible, and that she would kill for them. She added the twins, Dylan and Jace, who were like cousins, and Stacey and Stevie. She didn't think Quinn would let anyone kill for her, though. She had too much pride for that.

Rachel liked that.

"So, every city, huh?" she asked as they chopped squash and beans together. There weren't enough people to make the most of the crops, but what they could do they were doing in the time that they could before it got too cold for anything to grow. "From New Orleans to Bentonville, not one place that wasn't affected by the outbreak?" she asked. Quinn had already been interrogated by Shelby, but Rachel needed to know. If they were the only people left, there was no way society as a whole would be able to stabilize itself and sustain the human race.

"I saw some caravans," Quinn said quietly. Her nails were bitten to the quick and rubbed red with gun calluses. They would have been the kind that Rachel envied before, long and spindly. Rachel's hands, like the rest of her body, were proportioned small. She liked knives because their hilts were made for her. She liked rifles because they strengthened her arms and shoulders. "Four or five cars at a time. Usually we would hide when we saw them- I didn't tell them why, but I think Stevie knows." Her hands shook and she set the knife down. "God, I screwed up. They're gonna need therapy and medication when they're older that won't exist any more." Her accent got thicker when she was distressed.

"No," Rachel said, sorting the green away from the yellow. Canned squash, canned beans, preservation of food so they could survive, these were important things. "You saved them. Now you have to- you have to be their mother. They're your brother and sister."

"What?" Quinn asked. Rachel looked up, forehead creasing. Quinn loooked confused.

"Evans, right? I mean, all three of you are blonde and Evanses, so I assumed they were siblings. Are they cousins?"

Quinn looked down at her hands, flexed them and picked up her knife, resuming chopping. Maybe they could cook some of these tonight instead of having personal pizzas.

"Fabray. But that doesn't leave this room." She was snarling, the picture a vicious one. "New world, new name, right? They're mine, I can't let someone take them from me just because we aren't related by blood."

Quinn Fabray was a beautiful name, Rachel thought. But she was right. Whatever she wanted to be called here, she had that right.

"I won't tell anyone," she said, and went back to chopping.

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Dylan and Jace were twelve, so they didn't think Stevie was really going to work in the barn with them, but Stevie liked it better than anything else he'd ever done. He got to clean horses- even if horse poop was nasty- and Shelby showed him how to milk a cow so that no one got hurt and they had milk. He also collected eggs from the chickens, but his main job was taking the milk to the big room with five stoves inside, where Norah, who was married to James and who gave him candy if he was good and a smack if he was bad, would boil the milk and separate the cream. They made cheese, which they put in the refrigerators only after a day- "That's how we make it," James said, rubbing the short hairs on Stevie's head. Ollie called him "Little Steve", and let him and Stacey watch Captain America one night when Quinn and Rachel and Dylan and Jace were fishing and would be gone until the next day. Quinn slapped him for it.

"There were dead, Ollie," Stevie heard (he was really good at hiding in places where people wouldn't see him but he could hear them) Rachel tell him later. "Kids this time. Quinn's the best killer I've ever seen, and I thought we were going to die today."

Killer. Stevie didn't like that word.

"Is Quinn a killer?" he asked Shelby. She made him check on the pregnant cow, Asa, and came into the stall with him. She looked like Rachel, but she wasn't really Rachel's mom. Quinn had sat them down and told them that Shelby had helped Mr. and Mr. Berry have a baby, and that that baby had been Rachel. She was related to Shelby, and Shelby could help her if she ever got hurt badly because they had the same blood type, but Shelby wasn't her mom, not really.

"Yes, but not the way you think," Shelby said. She sat down and felt the outline of the calf with him. "Good, it's going to come out right," she said. "Quinn is a natural marksman, we've all seen this."

"That's what Daddy called her," Stevie said. Shelby nodded. She was looking at the cow's swollen stomach, not Stevie, but he couldn't help but feel that this was really, really important.

"Quinn can hit things that most people would call impossible. So she can kill things. Hunters stalk, and I don't know about your sister but from what I've seen, she doesn't like to stalk, and zombies can't be hunted. They don't have any mind, just hunger. We're building a wall because they could wander in and go toward the smell, but they don't reason. They can't get together and say, 'Oh, Stevie looks delicious today, let's eat him.' They just smell food and go after it. Killing them isn't bad."

"She didn't just kill zombies," Stevie said. The guy had bled on him, ruined his shirt. There was weird gunk in it that Stevie realized was brains after Quinn threw his shirt in a fire.

"Killers are everywhere, and not all of them are like your sister," Shelby said. She turned to him and smiled. "You're a good kid, and so she was good. Now she has us, so she'll stay good, but if you'd found other humans who wanted to use her she would have been bad."

Stevie thought about that. If Quinn was good because of them and other people would have made her bad, that meant that Shelby thought that killing wasn't really bad.

"You got it," she said when he repeated that. "It's what you use it for. We're probably going to have to kill a horse or two before winter is over, because chickens are more valuable and horse meat is good to eat. But killing Asa here, when her calf is just about to be born, that's evil. See?"

"I think so," Stevie said. He didn't really, it was too big for him to understand without thinking about it for years, but he felt better about it.

They all shared a bed, him and Stacey and Quinn. It was in the spare room the Berrys had, and Rachel had brought Stacey a big pink house for her to play with because she was too little to help work. Quinn had put everything that she said was theirs, not to be shared, in one corner of the room, and threatened Stevie and Stacey with spankings and a belt if they even thought of going near the guns without an adult present and making sure the gun was safe. She gave Stacey a box of ammunition to use as dolls and dress up with dresses because Rachel's dolls had 'accidentally' been melted when she was little.

"Don't eat them," she said. Stacey didn't eat them, either.

"They don't taste good anyway," she said quietly one night, probably the same night Quinn and the others were fishing.

It was October and Stacey turned five, which wasn't even a big deal anymore but Mrs. Samantha Morris, who was old and worked crocheting and knitting things for them to wear in the winter, made her a doll of cloth and stuffing and Quinn took her bullets back. Stevie didn't think about it, but Quinn had kept her hair short even though Stevie didn't. Another family moved in and a caravan was shot out of town.

Then the man showed up on the road.


	4. Refuge

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Seasons Greetings, all that good stuff! (This is brought to you in a special double update that will probably not be repeated.)

Heehee. Guess how Quinn and Rachel get to Lima? If you're reading It's the Zombie Apocalypse, Charlie Brown, you probably already have some idea. Without further ado:

* * *

Chapter Four

The town was walled, which was what Burt figured was progress. He'd left Lima with Carol looking for people who needed them, and when he saw how well established this settlement was compared to others he'd seen on the road he figured this place would be a good town to use as a secondary route for refugees. They'd been going west and southwest, him and Carol, and they ran into several caravans of people just looking for a place to settle. He gave them a map and a hose to drain gas from cars from, usually, and told them that if they were really quick they could make the trip in a few hours. They'd stopped doing that as they went through states, but there was no reason this trip had to last more than two days.

"Name and business," a girl said. She was probably eighteen, maybe a little younger. Burt had seen weirder things than a shaved head, honestly, so he didn't really look at that.

"Burt Hummel, this is Carol Hudson, we're just looking for people."

Another girl came through the gate, this one short, with long hair tied back. She looked at them and nodded.

"You can come in," she said, then added something to the guard- probably mentioning how little he and Carol actually looked like refugees, for all that they'd been out of Lima for more than a week. For all he knew they were refugees now, Sylvester had probably banned them from returning once they left so she could continue on her path to world domination. It had been less than a month since the outbreak and they had a functioning society in Lima- it was a screwed up society, to be fair, when his kid was supposed to go out and kill zombies and save people, but it was functioning. It looked like these people might have one too.

"Thank you, ma'am," he said. The girls opened the gate, which was taller than their heads but not by much, and waved them through. Carol was driving, so he walked alongside her, just in case they needed to shoot and run.

"I'm Rachel Berry, this is Quinn Evans," the nicer girl said. "Nice to meet you, Burt. You can park your car with the others." There was a courtyard that had three cars and two trucks in it already, so Carol parked their truck on the outside.

The house they were led into was nice, the extension being built on it even nicer. If Burt had tools he would have offered to help. Two men sat them down at a nice table and a woman and another man came in. This was probably 'The Law' here, then, which didn't bode well. The woman smiled at him and offered her hand.

"I'm Shelby."

linebreaklinebreaklinebreak

"Shut up, I can't hear!"

"For god's sakes, someone give me the cup."

"Just listen under the door."

Quinn cleared her throat. Jace, Dylan, and Stevie looked up. Quinn felt queasy, like she needed to throw up in the vase. Again.

"Don't you have work?" she asked. "There's crap in the stable, I already know that because that's constant." She glared at them until they left, then Rachel came up to her. She sighed. "What are we going to do with them?" she asked. She tried to sound like she was confident there would be a 'her' to deal with them anyway. Whatever was wrong with her hadn't gone away, not even when Mr. Berry gave her actual penicilin- which had mostly been phased out of hospitals but was still perfectly easy to make, he assured her. Nothing seemed wrong with her, except that she was sick every day and she could barely work she was so tired.

"Well, you- you'll keep Stevie away from them as much as possible, since they seem to be swearing a lot." Rachel had been preoccupied lately, like something was wrong, even though the worst thing that had happened was a horse breaking a foot and being put down. There were other horses anyway; Quinn didn't know why people got attached to things that were essentially cars. They were stabled away from the cul de sac, which was looking more and more like a town every day. There were two fewer horses than there had been people in the beginning, which was to say fifteen, because Quinn didn't think of herself in relation to the beginning of the town. "And I'll tell Shelby to discipline them." She smiled at Quinn, who smiled back but barely, and handed her a cup of vitamins. "You didn't take them this morning. Dad got worried, but I told him you probably thought they wouldn't stay down."

Things stayed down, but only if she ate them in a certain order, and she never felt well. She could still work, she was just irritable during work and couldn't do as much. She fell asleep in the stables once, got woken up by Stevie.

"Come on, we're welcome," Rachel said. They opened the door, Quinn smiling at Shelby and crossing to the refrigerator. Their house had been the only one with working solar panels as well as a generator, but all cooking had been moved to the communal cooking room so the more valuable generators had been moved there. The generator they had ran on natural gas, which they'd gotten from several stores and stored (carefully), to be used later. They didn't let anyone run unnecessary power after dark, which was why the fireplaces in the old houses had been used more often than not. Refrigerators were constant, and Quinn had burned her hands while changing the oil in their generator before.

She stacked homemade cheese on some crackers that had somehow survived more than a month into the apocalypse, eating them quickly. The consistency was of cottage cheese, which she'd never loved, but it was good enough that she almost let her emotions show. The man calling himself Burt Hummel was staring at them, though, so all she did was eat and put the cheese back.

"Like I was saying, we have enough people that we could really get your town up and running. You could even get people at the power plants, start supplying real electricity here, and then expand in the spring."

"I'm assuming you'd be sending people with guns as well," Shelby said. Quinn stiffened, because she hadn't thought of that. They were competent, yes, but if Hummel came from a city that had survived the plague- something Quinn hadn't known was possible- they could take over and force them to submit, and there was nothing one girl with a gun and a bunch of farmers could do about it.

"There are more zombies than actual people, ma'am," Burt said. Carol put a hand over his arm and smiled.

"We're not on a colonizing mission. We're looking for refugees, and we've come across several hundred in between Ohio and here alone. We would like to be able to send refugees here without them having to be afraid of dying. We also have a greater food supply, so you wouldn't starve during this first winter, and we have physicians for anyone who's sick."

"We'll think about it," Hiram said. "You can sleep in our guest room tonight. Tomorrow we'll let you go with our decision."

Burt thanked him and left with Carol, who stared at Quinn and smiled like she knew something Quinn didn't. It made Quinn nervous.

"We're going to do it, right Daddy?" Rachel asked. "Because I know you're good and all, but Quinn needs a doctor, and fast."

Quinn rolled her eyes, replying, "I'm not dying, Rachel, not that fast. Whatever it is is probably something they can't fix anyway."

"Rachel, Hiram, Leroy, can I have a moment with Quinn, please?" Shelby asked. Rachel and her mother had a conversation with their eyebrows, which ended with Rachel, hand over her mouth, looking between them with wide eyes. She looked like she was going to cry, but not in a bad way. Quinn was left alone with Shelby, who smiled at her (reassuringly, trying to calm her down, body language open). "You probably thought it was the stress," she said, looking her over. "But your blood count is significantly higher- you have a flush that doesn't go away." Quinn had noticed this, of course, but she hadn't thought about it. It was just another symptom of whatever she had. "Quinn, when was the last time you had your menstrual period?"

"Oh my god," Quinn said. Then she laughed. "I'm not pregnant, Shelby, I haven't had- not since before, and it was like one time. And I've had my period, it was-" She tried to think of when it had been- she'd seen blood, right? She thought she'd seen blood one day, had thought that it was nature taking its course as always, like there weren't zombies all around them. "I mean, I usually have lighter periods. Just because this was only a day and a half doesn't mean it wasn't real."

Shelby got up from the table and went over to the cabinets, pulling a box out of one. It was a pregnancy test, and Quinn felt herself begin to cry, even if it was just slightly. She hadn't cried all that much since the breakout.

"I can't be pregnant," she said again, almost laughing as Shelby led her to the bathroom. It was dark, with a candle lit in it so they didn't waste power. The toilet would flush when emptying the bucket by the side of it into it. Quinn's hand didn't shake as she put the stick between her legs; it didn't even factor in as a possibility in her mind. She had some sort of wasting sickness, not a kid inside her.

Pink. Pink was negative, right? But it was a pink plus sign, and Quinn felt it drop because it wasn't possible. They'd used a condom. They'd been careful. Sam was dead, he couldn't be a father.

She sat on the ground in the hall, hand in her mouth so she didn't scream and make people worry. Shelby sat next to her, awkwardly because she was older and couldn't just sit down.

"When I found out I was pregnant with Rachel I didn't feel anything," she said. "It was a business transaction. Then the hormones kicked in, and I got so pissed that my ankles were getting fat because I wanted to dance and I couldn't. I didn't look at the sonograms of her, but when she kicked me for the... I think it was the third time, not the first, but Rachel was a really energetic fetus- I realized: this kid is half mine. I can't just give it away and agree to some contract that forces me to stay away for eighteen years. So I talked to Hiram and Leroy, because I knew they had expected something worse. I told them I couldn't take the money and be out of her life forever, that even though I knew I couldn't be her mother, I had to at least be with her. And we moved here, when I was seven months pregnant. They used the money they'd been going to pay me to buy me a house, and I signed another contract, one that said I would provide breast milk for the first five months of Rachel's life. It was an excuse, of course, so they would know that I wasn't just going to abandon their kid. I never did." She grabbed Quinn's knee, which was usually ticklish but felt like nothing now. "What I'm trying to say is that this isn't the end. It's the beginning of the biggest story of your life."

"He's dead," she said. "I shot him and he's dead, Shelby, how is this in any way good?" she asked. Shouted. Whatever, she was- she was pregnant, she was allowed to be hormonal. "Rachel knows?" she asked. "Of course Rachel knows." She smiled wryly. "Rachel always knows people better than they know themselves."

"She does at that," Shelby said. "If they have a doctor, and it sounds like they've got more than that, it sounds like someone stole an entire factory and possibly a town to be honest, you need to be there."

"But Stacey, she can't travel. Stevie too, you need him, and I need to stay to help."

"We've got everything stored, Quinn, we're prepared. You have to go." Shelby smiled. Her lips were warm when they kissed Quinn's forehead, warm and dry. "We'll keep Stacey and Stevie safe. We'll even teach them how to shoot."

Quinn laughed, but it felt like she was crying.


End file.
